For my third semester of practicum, I wanted to experience something different. After being a guest lecturer for a small and a big class during my first and second term respectively, I decided to approach Dr. Kathy Nomme for mentoring my teaching in a laboratory course. BIOL140 is a first-year level lab course that is mandatory for almost all students in the Faculty of Science. Compared to upper year lab courses, students in BIOL140 spend more time on doing “dry lab”, in which they learn about scientific writing, planning fair experiments, and how to do scientific critique. Therefore, the opportunity of facilitation in BIOL140 is lot more than other lab courses.

The class I was observing today had just about 30 students. This was one of the 36 sections being offered in this term, and was opened to only students in the Science One Program. The class started with introduction of the agenda, with the estimated time scheduled per activity being provided. Three activities in total were carried out in this 3-hour course, each with specific learning outcome. There were not much actual “lecturing” happening during class. In order to reach the different learning outcomes, Dr. Nomme asked a lot of questions to guide students to think about the topic. There were also class activities like group discussion and PBL-style exercises. In order to keep track with students throughout the exercise, Dr. Nomme would start with giving instructions, then give time to students for working on the exercise, and check in again halfway through. Time cues were given throughout so students knew if they were falling behind or not. What I also noticed was that students were generally quiet and needed lots of encouragement for speaking out. The classroom was also quite long width-wise, which could impact students in either end hearing comments from their fellow classmates.

After the observation, I learnt some techniques in teaching an activity-heavy course. Before my practicum, I will be thinking of how to engage students in participating discussions and answering questions. Although the in-class activities were pre-designed to align with all 36 sections, I will think of ways to provide my own input to the teaching material. I am looking forward to teaching in this new environment.